Maintaining an underlying troubleshooting option

[imported_Kiwi]

When Win9X was rather new, and especially when it was Win95, pre-debugging, I relied on MS-DOS to occasionally fix things that went wrong. After Win2000 came along, it was the Win98se that I kept as a dual-boot emergency option. But as the systems become much more powerful and complicated, the old warhorse is just developing too much nose hair and too many ugly warts.

There are no longer W9X drivers for current hardware, and Windows98 seems unable to keep ignoring a second GB of RAM besides the single GB it was always willing to accept was only 512 MBs because I set up something in an INI file somewhere. Now, it seems to lose track when I set up that sort of workaround for it.

If the only thing I want from a basic dual-boot's emergency option is to occasionally initiate repairs, are any AT folks out there with 'Nix / 'Nux exposure familiar with a particular distro that is really well-equipped for this?

(Sure, I know there are some super-duper whatevers that put everything on a bootable CD, but that's not what I want to do, thank you anyway.)

 

[Nothinman]

I generally just grab an Ubuntu or Knoppix LiveCD and use that. Since they use a unionfs mount for the root filesystem I can install whatever packages I need into the LiveCD at runtime, of course they're lost after a reboot but that usually doesn't matter.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I generally just grab an Ubuntu or Knoppix LiveCD and use that. Since they use a unionfs mount for the root filesystem I can install whatever packages I need into the LiveCD at runtime, of course they're lost after a reboot but that usually doesn't matter.

I keep a knoppix cd in my laptop bag. Ive got a usb stick with DSL on it, but only recently, and I have yet to fiddle with it much in an attempt to try and turn it into anything similar. Knoppix, as is, is great otherwise. Even if you arent *that* familiar with *nix, you can load it, hop online and troubleshoot what ails you to see if theres a way to fix it from a live cd.